Are You Ready for Fusion?

Fusion changes the upside for teams running dbt. The harder question is whether your current foundation can support the move well. That is where the readiness assessment can make a big difference.

Fusion promises a faster, more responsive way to build in dbt. It improves feedback loops, reduces unnecessary warehouse compute, and gives teams a more modern development experience.

For most organizations, though, the important question is not whether Fusion sounds valuable. It is whether their current foundation can support the move successfully.

That is why we built our Fusion Readiness Assessment. It helps teams evaluate what has to be true across their project, their delivery practices, and their team structure to migrate with confidence instead of guesswork.

Why readiness matters now

With Core, teams often rely on running warehouse compute just to catch issues that are relatively small: syntax errors, broken references, and type mismatches. This slows development down and adds cost to work that is often just part of routine data development lifecycle.

Fusion improves on this process by giving teams faster feedback as they work. The result is a development experience that feels quicker, more responsive, and better suited (and more cost efficient) to the way modern analytics teams build.

That upside is exactly why readiness matters. A move from Core to Fusion does not only test the engine. It also tests the broader system around it: project design, development and deployment habits, governance, ownership, and technical depth.

What “Fusion ready” actually means

We define Fusion readiness in a simple way: you are Fusion ready when you have confidence that your data foundation can support the move smoothly, securely, and at scale.

That confidence should not come from instinct alone. It should come from a clear view of how your organization works today and where migration friction is most likely to appear.

That is also why readiness is not a universal checklist. Every data team operates with a different level of maturity, a different tolerance for change, and a different mix of technical and organizational complexity. A good assessment should reflect these realities.

How the assessment works

Our assessment looks at readiness across three pillars: Project, Process, and People. We use these three because, in practice, they shape the outcome of nearly every dbt migration.

Project

Within Project, we look at the technical patterns that affect migration complexity. That includes how consistently the project follows repeatable implementation conventions around directory structures, naming, testing, and documentation, how much custom logic is in play, how heavily the team relies on advanced features (e.g. model contracts, Python data models) and whether the broader foundation reflects dbt best practices.

Process

Within Process, we look at governance, delivery, and repeatability. Does the team have mature patterns to move changes from development to production without introducing instability and/or downtime for consumers? In what ways can the team review, test, document, and monitor these changes? What level of governance exists with respect to access controls and ADLC standards

People

Within People, we look at the depth and distribution of hands-on knowledge across the team. A migration is easier to support when expertise is not concentrated in one person, ownership of the data models and the data in the data warehouse is clear, and the organization has the capacity to learn, adapt, and resolve issues as they come up.

Each pillar is assessed, quantified, and then rolled into an overall Fusion Readiness score. The goal is to make the output easy to understand and useful in conversation, not to create a false sense of precision.

In practice, the assessment is meant to answer a short list of planning questions:

• How ready are we today?
• Where is migration friction most likely to show up?
• What should we focus on first?
• What should improve before we reassess?
  
  

Why the pillars need to be read together

The assessment looks at Project, Process, and People separately, but the real value comes from evaluating them as parts of a whole.

A dbt project may be technically mature, but if delivery practices are inconsistent, a migration can still be hard to manage. A team may have established governance and release patterns, but if ownership is unclear or hands-on expertise is uneven, execution can stall. A capable team should not have to compensate for project issues that could be surfaced and addressed earlier in the process.

That is why we do not treat any single pillar as the answer. Fusion readiness is shaped by how the technical foundation, the operating model, and the team support one another. Looking at them together gives a more realistic view of where migration will be smooth, where friction is likely to appear, and where focused improvement will have the biggest impact.

What the output helps teams do

The value of the assessment is not just the score. It is the interpretation behind it.

When the results come back, teams can see where readiness is more established, where there are gaps to address, and what should be prioritized before moving forward. In some cases, that may point to project cleanup. In others, it may highlight process refinement or the need for clearer ownership and broader hands-on expertise.

That makes the output useful at multiple levels. Practitioners get a clearer view of the technical and operational work that will reduce migration friction. Leaders get a shared language for planning, prioritization, and risk management. Instead of relying on instinct or general enthusiasm, teams can make decisions based on a more complete view of their starting point.

A good readiness assessment does not just tell you where you stand. It helps you decide what to do next.

Fusion is the destination. Readiness is the roadmap.

Fusion represents a meaningful step forward for dbt teams. The speed improvements are real, and the ADLC experience is materially better. The long-term upside is clear.

But the teams that will benefit most are not the ones that move first. They are the ones that understand what they are moving from, what needs attention before the transition, and how to make that move with confidence.

That is the role of readiness. Our Fusion Readiness Assessment helps teams take that first look inward, quantify what matters across Project, Process, and People, and turn that picture into a more practical migration plan.

If your team is thinking seriously about Fusion, the smartest first step is not to assume readiness. It is to assess it.